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If you thought this fancy navy suit will serve you any good you are so wrong!! And you lady, gray is no color to meet a potential recruiter, better think again.
As a matter of fact, the first thing that any prospective graduate should do when starting a job hunting process in Japan is to dress the part.
In Japan, one does not simply suit-up Barney Stinson style to go job hunting.
First, you have to make sure to get the black suit. No prints, no fancy fabric, just simple double buttoned black suit. If you are a girl, you still have a choice between a skirt and pants suit. But then again, you should keep the color to a simple black and the pencil skirt to knee length.
Complicated much? Go tell the poor Gaijin (foreigner) that I am!!
When I first started my “job hunting” endeavours, I went naturally shopping for a suit. I started looking around different shapes and sober colours. I couldn’t stray much from the sober anyway because in Japanese serious suits shops, you could hardly find anything very far from the gray-navy-beige spectrum.
So here I was looking around, picturing how convincing I could look in that beige suit, when a nice shop clerk came to help. As I explained what I was looking for her face lit up with a knowing smile. She then directed me to a corner of the shop with all the “recruit suits”. I wasn’t very thrilled at the sight of all this black and white, but I still gave it a shot.
When I saw the silhouette looking back at me from the mirror in her black suit and crisp white shirt, I half expected her to start speaking in perfect Japanese. And knowing my level of Japanese, that kind of deceptive impression wouldn’t do me any good.
I finally settled for a dark grey suit, determined to make up for this slight deviation from the rules by keeping a more by the book attitude in everything else.
That was before I knew what this implied.

And gentlemen, if you thought you were off the hook, don’t be so eager to rejoice.

Et messieurs, si vous pensiez être saufs, attendez de voir le reste.

Do I need say more?

Y a-t-il encore quelque chose à rajouter?

After these futile material matters are taken care of, we move on to more spiritual subjects. My dear friends, please know that the height at which you decide to tie you pony tail is crucial to the impression you give. It is actually directly proportional to your ambitions.

And I won’t even get into the philosophical aspects of make-up, because as you certainly know it, a tad too pronounced cheek color may ruin the day. I won’t even bore you with the tale of the “job hunting make-up seminar” I unintentionally found myself sitting at just to get “strongly advised” to apply concealer to my eyes so as to make them look smaller.

With all these dos and don’ts, you’d probably think I am a bit funny in the head to continue with this whole job hunting craziness. What would you think then if I told you that after close examination of the above mentioned book, I started seeing sense in what was said, and even trying to convince Mr.Not-Japanese-at-all of their logic.
It might be the time I spent here, or the desperate need to “fit-in”, or else the seemingly strong logic on which this book relies; but at the end of the day, I can’t help but be amazed at the religious efforts made to keep this ceremony (or masquerade, depends on where you see it from) going on, and feel somehow lucky to be different enough not to be subjected to the tyranny of the color of my suit or height of my pony tail.

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Or so I thought at first. Because where I come from, there is no such a thing as daikon.

Well, I must have seen Daikons in Japanese cartoons when I was a kid, but I was a kid and there was no google so I couldn’t just touch the screen of my phone to get a full botanical definition of the thing.
So back to the present day and the blessings of internet, and here I hame seeing Daikon lurking at me from every corner of every supermarket. It is crazy how much they sell of them, and how cheap!!
For a long time I was just walking by ignoring them, but then I got to taste the buggers. And boy do they taste nice when pickled.
So long story short, it started with that little bite, then it was my plate of pickles every time we ate out. After a while the Daikon pickles became part of the weekly shopping list. Until the day I could lie to myself anymore and got me a nice Tsukemono (pickles in Japanese, for my two cents of Japanese of the day)book, and half a Daikon to start with. And yes, Daikons are so big that they are cut and sold by halves.
So here how I made my first Daikon pickles ever:

Finally, I peeled the Yuzu and cut the skin in tiny cubes (the size of the nail of my little finger, as kindly indicated by my recipe).

Then pressed a mixture under an improvised weight. I should have had something like the glass dish in the middle of the picture below, but seen as I am not ready yet to become a pickles pro, I just piled up mu plates on the poor Daikon pickles.

In the end, it all went well, and the pickles turned out not bad at all!!!

I guess Daikon is not that bad after all 🙂

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When I decided to come to Japan, some of my friends said I was crazy: at 27, I had a decent job, finally a car that doesn’t threaten of breaking down every 5km, and great friends that were more family than friends.
Most of my friends said I had guts.
Some people told me I needed to learn as much as I could about the culture before going in order to blend in, learn some Japanese as well…
In my luggage I took Moroccan tea, dried mint and some spices. I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to survive without Moroccan mint tea and Ras el Hanout*!!
But I was so wrong. It doesn’t take guts to come to Japan, after all Japan is one of the safest places on earth: in 3 years here, not once did I even hear two people arguing in the street (a nostalgic sigh for the lively streets of Casablanca). It doesn’t take Moroccan tea, you get so quickly used to drinking green tea after all. Spices don’t matter all that much neither, because after a while you learn where to find them and you even start to appreciate and cook Japanese.

So what do you need to come to Japan?

1- Nice hair: If you have frizzy, unruly hair, just get ready to suffer. In summer it is so humid it is just comical. After spending hours with the hair dryer, as soon as my locks smell a whiff of the outside air, it goes into a crazy dance. Can you blame Moroccan hair for dancing?? Really!!

2- A lean figure: otherwise, good luck with the shopping. I mean it is almost a must to be slim here that I am surprised they don’t put it as a requirement for getting a visa. Whether you are in university or in a company, you have to go through a yearly health check where they won’t hesitate to point out any extra around your waist line. On a more practical level, whether it is a kimono or a small tutu skirt you want to get, you’d better be small (both in width as in height). My shopping since I came here is all jeans from Uniqlo, an I am not all that tall!!!

3- A good tolerance to cuteness: because wherever you turn your head it is sickeningly cute. Even the garbage truck rolls around with a cute melody and small and stuffed animals. even make up cases are all sparkly and shiny. It is just all so nice, glossy and sparkly that sometimes you wonder if it is not all a big joke.

4- A short memory: because you will get used to cuteness, and eventually will love it. So all the illuminations around Christmas time will start feeling romantic, and you will fall in love with the small sparkly phone case. So you’d better forget all the prejudices you had about cuteness 🙂

But most of all, you’ll need an open mind and a good sense of humour. Because as much as it fascinating and enjoyable to be in Japan, you quickly understand that it can get very lonely as well. So better take it all with a smile and just enjoy the ride…while it lasts 🙂

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With the nights getting colder and longer in December, it is always nice to have something sweet to nibble on while snuggling under the blankets in front of a nice movie. Ok, I am describing my ideal evening; not what really happens with me running to complete a report or take care of some house chores that can’t wait until the week end.
Whatever your evenings look like, one thing is sure, no one likes to spend hours in the kitchen just to make that sweet something to eat in front of TV.
So here’s a recipe that doesn’t take ages to realize, tastes good and is a no fail (0 fails in every single attempt I made at it).
Here is what you will need:
– 3 eggs
– 150g powder sugar
– 160g flour
– 1 tea spoon baking powder
– 130g slightly salted butter
-1 big spoon of cocoa powder (I used van houten)

For the filling:
– 3 bananas
– 1 table spoon butter
– 1 table spoon powder sugar
– Vanilla extractIf you want you can add a handful of crushed nuts.You start by beating the eggs and the sugar unteil they get foamy and slightly snowy, then you add little by little the flour, baking powder, melted butter and the cocoa.

On a frying pan, you mix together the filling ingredients: butter, the bananas that you would have previously cut into small pieces, the sugar and the vanilla extract. You keep the mix on the fire until they get soft and slightly caramelized (3~4 minutes).

Add the caramelized bananas to the mix of eggs and flour and the crushed nuts. Get all the ingredients into a homogeneous mixture using a wooden spoon.Pour into a buttered/floured cake mold and cook into a preheated oven, 180degrees for 35 minutes.
Enjoy 🙂

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It all started one year ago: my big journey towards finding a job in Japan. Well, technically it started when I was six and dreaming of this country that all these Arabic dubbed Manga I watched on TV talked about. But that would be too long to share here.

So long story short: I landed in Japan a couple of years ago, and last year I was faced with three choices: continue to a PhD course, become a super qualified housewife or find a job.

For some reasons (that I might explain later), the two first choices didn’t have much appeal to me. So I decided I’d go with option three and start “job hunting”.

And I’d do it the Japanese way.

What’s the big deal? You would ask me.

The big deal is that we’re talking about JAPAN! And nothing in Japan, absolutely nothing, is left out without some rule, whether written or commonly known, to abide by.

You can get the feel of it by knowing that in Japan “job hunting season” is a whole even here. First it is a “season”, they talk about it in the news as such and there are special sales in stores for THE season. And it starts two years before graduation.

This means that if you are an undergraduate student and you are graduating let’s say in March 2014, you start looking for a job in April 2012.

That’s just another part of “the way it is” in Japan, another of these things that don’t make much sense to you, but you know that either you follow the rule or you stay in margin of the system. But once you get in, you quickly get formatted by the machine and slowly get to understand the codes and quirks of the process.

Although I began my “job hunting” quiet late, I had so far 12 months full of discoveries, many funny moments and a couple of WTH moments.

But so far the good outweighs the bad, and I am going to tell you all about it in here.